The marketing of various products and services in today's retail and wholesale environments has created an upsurge in the use of redemption certificates, coupons, rebate checks, tags, identification confirmation pieces and the like. Often such articles range in a variety of sizes due to the delivery mechanism that was used in providing the article to the intended consumer or recipient. In addition, with the rise in business products for home use, the ability to prepare business forms such as checks, coupons and other non-standard configuration forms and the like on an individual basis increases demand for such products and spurs usage by consumers. However, there are difficulties in handling and processing such articles by clearing houses, redemption centers and the like as to do so may require supplement software or additional formatting of printing or processing equipment.
In addition to the foregoing business products, other negotiable instruments may need to be treated or handled separately from those received in the normal course of business. Such special handling may arise out of the document having been partially torn or ripped during its processing, the document may be an odd size, loss or unreadable MICR numbers which aid in the routing and payment and satisfaction of the sums referenced in the negotiable instrument and other difficulties with the processing of checks, bank drafts and other documents.
One such prior art solution for handling documents is marketed under the trademark LASER TAXI® by Hico Products or Barrington, Ill. and covered by U.S. Pat. No. 5,087,238. This product uses one or more strips of tape to which documents are attached and then a flap is folded over the document while the document is processed through sorting equipment. One of the incumbent difficulties associated with this particular product is that the adhesive contained on the tape has a tendency to loose its adhesive tack strength relatively quickly. In addition, in order to be able to reuse the device, the user must locate the release strip that originally covered the adhesive strips and then carefully reposition the strip over the adhesive tape. This can be a frustrating exercise in that it requires some care in aligning the strip(s) with the adhesive in order that the form can be saved and reused later. In the event that the release strip is lost or misplaced, then the form likely becomes unusable as it will adhere to any surface that the form comes into contact with and creates a nuisance in the office environment in that the form cannot simply be placed in areas with other papers as the form with its exposed adhesive will stick to the other papers which may potentially cause such papers to be torn upon the attempted removal of the carrier form.
Other prior art solutions include the addition of a label that is attached to check or other document to be processed. While this increases the surface area of the document that is to be handled, it requires the user to find the labels and where the label covers the machine readable indicia, the label must first be printed with the information that is now concealed by the auxiliary label. In addition, the use of such supplemental labels may cause the business form or other document to splay out of alignment with the printing, reading or processing device which can cause improper reads, rendering of incorrect fields and other problems.
Still other prior art solutions include U.S. Pat. No. 6,090,470 which provides for a sheet of paper having an exposed adhesive grid pattern to temporarily hold odd sized documents for scanning. As suggested earlier, with the exposed adhesive pattern, the adhesive may inadvertently stick or adhere to areas or documents that were not intended.
Another prior art solution is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,725,254 which utilizes a tab system that is intended to hold documents of non-standard configurations in position so that the document may be read by a facsimile machine. The difficulty with this construction is that the user is then forced to move the tabs into an alternating arrangement so that the form is held in position.
A yet still further prior art solution is marketed under the trademark MICRA® by Micra Document Carrier Division of Milwaukee, Wis. and described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,043,506. The construction includes an opaque sheet to which a glassine or other transparent material is adhered. This envelope type construction has a length of approximately 8¾″ by 4″. The problem associated with this construction is that the construction cannot be easily handled by sheet fed equipment in that the envelope has a non-standard sheet size. In addition, the construction cannot be used to simultaneously scan both sides of the document and requires the user to remove the document, invert the document and then reinsert the document for subsequent scanning, which is a time consuming process.
What is needed therefore is a document carrier that can be handled easily by sheet fed equipment and which enables the simultaneous scanning of both sides of the document in a single pass of the document carrier through the processing or handing equipment.